House Lessons

by Erica Bauermeister

  If I really wanted to be a writer, I understood that at some point—not that day, perhaps, but at some point—I would have to learn to listen. Because here’s the thing about great writing, and it’s the same as with a successful renovation or marriage—in the end, the most important part is empathy.

  “Have we made a day of it, then?” asked Tom. I looked around. The yuck room was empty.

  * * *

  —

  WE SAT AROUND A table at the local pizza restaurant, where they’d welcomed our tired bodies without a single glance at the condition of our clothes. I had marched the kids into the bathroom, where we washed every accessible inch of skin with soap and the hottest water we could stand. Back at the table, the smell of warm cheese and tomato sauce flowed around us. The beer glass in my hand was cold, its contents clean in my throat. It was dark outside, and a few evening tourists walked the main street of town, where little white lights lined the windows of the shops.

  “Well, that,” Tom said, taking a long and meditative drink, “was what I would call a transformative experience.”

  I considered what he said as I looked at my children. We had thought it would be hard work, dirty work, the kind that makes you stronger and fills you with an appreciation of your own life and a sympathy for others. But no matter how often we had sent them on errands or out to jump rope, I knew they had learned about a lot more than responsibility, and the realization shook me. If Ben and I had known the extent of what we would find, we never would have brought them. But even with all we had seen during the inspection, we didn’t understand—or, perhaps more accurately, could not imagine—what it would really be like. The problem with imagination is that while we like to think of it like a boat, sailing free across an infinite ocean, the reality is that it will always be moored to the dock of what we already know. Our experience that day had extended Ben’s and my imaginations. But it had also done the same for our kids.

  As parents, we know our children will eventually go out into the world and encounter its variations, good and bad, but that it is our job to protect them while they are with us. Even with the best of intentions, however, things don’t always go the way we thought they would. Dealing with the ramifications of those decisions is what makes parenting a job that never truly ends. Sitting there at the table, our kids seemed far more concerned with how long the pizza was taking to arrive than the things they had seen that day, but I knew as well as anyone that all that was part of them now and would be processed bit by bit in the back of their minds for the rest of their lives. The only way out was through.

  “What did you think of today?” I asked them.

  Our daughter stopped her visual scan of the restaurant.

  “It was sad,” she said after a moment.

  “They had so many furnaces,” my son noted. “They must have been cold.”

  “Who do you think they were?” Kate asked.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “I think they were sad.”

  And with that, we started to tell a story.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE END OF the second day, the house was almost empty. As I was headed out with the last of the loads of newspapers, I passed Ben, who was standing on the stairway, a broom in his hand. I looked around me, at the windows barely held in their frames, the plaster warping on the walls, the precipitous slope of the floors. I was dirty and tired, and I just wanted to get me and the kids out of there. But more than that, what Ben was doing seemed futile in the face of the monster projects still to come.

  “You’re sweeping?” I asked, stupefied.

  “Yup,” he said, and kept on.

  I grabbed the keys to the truck and left, shaking my head.

  A half hour later, I returned. As I walked through the dining room, I suddenly stopped. There were the stairs, a clean, ascending line of wood leading up to a pair of six-foot-tall windows on the middle landing. Above me were the sounds of Reed and Tina dismantling one last bed frame; outside, I could hear the kids discussing the best use for the old camper shell in the yard. But there in the middle of the house was one moment of perfect stillness—and in the quiet, I could hear what sounded like the house taking a long, deep breath.

  ARCHITECTS AND BUILDERS

  Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places—and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.

  —Alain de Botton

  WITH THE TRASH GONE, we could finally begin to see the lines of the house. Architects call these lines “bones”—the essential layout of a building, the way the rooms fit one into another.

  Our house was built in 1909, after the quest for the railroad terminus failed and Port Townsend changed its expectations. And yet for all that, an American Foursquare is an optimistic, forward-thinking design. Its bones are straight and generous, its main rooms arranged like four strong pillars, with full-height ceilings on both floors. The first-floor rooms open one to the next, while a large landing on the second floor provides a gathering place for the bedrooms upstairs. There is not a single hallway, not an inch of wasted space, and while it is not a big house, it lives larger than its square footage.

  * * *

  —

  IT SURPRISED ME TO learn that the American Foursquare design was influenced by none other than Frank Lloyd Wright. When I think of the sleek rectangular shapes that characterize Wright’s designs, the last thing that comes to mind is a two-story square box. But box is the operative word here. Born only two years after the Civil War ended, Frank Lloyd Wright knew well the Victorian architecture that characterizes Port Townsend. His goal was to “break open the box” of the small, dark rooms that characterized many Victorians and create floor plans that allowed for easy movement throughout a house. The Foursquare design is strongly influenced by the fluid Prairie style, which shocked the public and helped make Wright famous. For all that our house feels traditional now, at the time its design was a radical departure, inspired by a visionary.

  In my experience, architects fall into two categories—the visionaries and the collaborators. The visionaries are the demigods, lifted above us by their unassailable passion for innovation. Their audacity makes sense in a way: architects make shapes out of air, create life from nothing. Their designs influence how you feel as you enter your house, where (and thus how) you eat, the kind of gatherings that will naturally happen or not, and even how inclined you are to have sex. It’s a lot of power, and it would be easy to become drunk on it.

  When you look at a building like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater—a masterpiece of concrete and cantilevers that leans out over a waterfall, becoming part of nature rather than passively viewing it from a distance—the structure becomes even more astonishing when you realize it was designed in the mid-1930s, without the aid of the software and building technology that have been developed in the eighty-plus years since then. But Wright was never what you would call a collaborator with his clients, nor did he particularly care if his houses functioned well as homes. His buildings were designed to “human scale,” but as he was five foot seven, his houses felt short for some of his clients. And while his floor plans may have been free-flowing, his control of what would occur within them was strict. He designed built-ins, even furniture. In her biography of Wright, Ada Louise Huxtable relates how Wright would sometimes go into “his” houses when the current owners weren’t home and rearrange the furniture the way he thought it should be. To Wright, his houses were art, more than places where families would live. When clients complained about roof leaks, which they often did, his response was reportedly a cavalier: “That’s how you know it’s a roof.”

  This approach of architect knows best was a hallmark of the Modernists working during that period, and particularly the Internationalists. The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, one of the most famous, confidently asserted that “what [modern man] wa
nts is a monk’s cell, well lit and heated, with a corner from which he can look at the stars.” Le Corbusier aimed his sights toward a functional future and away from ideas of family or nostalgia. His Villa Savoye is a floating white geometric shape, resting on thin white columns, lifting volume into air. It is otherworldly in its beauty, and utterly antiseptic. Villa Savoye was named a historic monument while Le Corbusier was still alive—an astonishing achievement. And yet, like Wright’s Fallingwater, Villa Savoye leaked and cracked. The owners were not, shall we say, universally pleased. As a homeowner, I always find myself thinking of the owners of these structures, even as I remain in awe of the achievement.

  And perhaps this is the crux of the issue. Architecture lives in a strange middle land between imagination and reality. To whom does a building really belong? The person who designed it? The public who sees its exterior? Or the client who lives inside?

  A striking example of vision over client came from German American architect Mies van der Rohe’s design for Edith Farnsworth, a physician who wanted a small second home near a rural creek in northern Illinois. Built in 1951, the Farnsworth House is striking—a glass box, lifted like a prayer above the earth. It was not as peaceful to live in, however. Farnsworth once said, “In this house with its four walls of glass I feel like a prowling animal, always on the alert…. I can’t even put a clothes hanger in my house without considering how it affects everything from the outside…. The house is transparent, like an X-ray.”

  Van der Rohe sued Farnsworth for outstanding construction costs, which had run far over original expectations. She countersued for fraud. The press and many historians have portrayed her suit as a case of scorned love, gleefully noting her six-foot-tall stature and her “equine features.” But I think about that glass house and the feeling of always being watched, not just by what is outside but by the person who designed it, who wanted you to live a certain way. His way. And I find myself siding with Farnsworth.

  Perhaps the pinnacle of the architect-centered approach was Deconstructivism. The Vitruvian goals of stability, utility, and beauty were thrown out with the bathwater in this approach. Architect Peter Eisenman’s House VI has columns that sometimes don’t make it to the floor and sometimes land in the middle of a stairway. One the strangest features is a skylight that flows across the ceiling of the master bedroom, then turns into a narrow window as it runs down the wall, and then continues back across the floor, almost like a glass river. It’s thought-provoking and could be admirable, except for the fact that it forces the owners to sleep in twin beds on either side of it. The design wasn’t a mistake; it was “postfunctionalism,” created to “frustrate normal functions.” Frustrate being the operative word.

  Perhaps it goes without saying that the roof for House VI has been replaced at least three times since the house was built.

  * * *

  —

  IF IT ISN’T OBVIOUS by now, I have a love-hate relationship with visionary architects. Their most experimental works cause me to reconsider gravity and how I see the world, and their contributions as artists are vital to the forward movement of our culture. The problem comes when we try to make homes out of sculptures. And while there are some homeowners who enjoy being caretakers of someone else’s eccentric genius, I wanted an architect who worked with me, not above me.

  I still remember the day I found Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building. I was in a small bookstore on Whidbey Island, the kind of place where you almost always discover a book that will change your life—although it will likely not be the title you came in to find. The Timeless Way of Building is not eye-catching or flashy. Its cover is a soft yellow, and the words inside look like they were written on an old-school typewriter, while the photos are a fuzzy black and white, and of people more often than buildings. Although it was published in 1979, the book feels like a message from even longer ago—but within the space of a paragraph, I was hooked. Through Alexander’s eyes, things that I had always instinctively felt about houses became real, solid.

  Alexander contends that the primary purpose of a home’s design is to make us feel alive—not through acres of granite kitchen counters or sumptuous master bathrooms, but by reinforcing patterns of living that make us our best selves. He studied the ease or discomfort we instinctively feel in buildings and came up with 253 principles that architects can follow. He watched how people settle into rooms with windows on two sides, follow a light down a hallway to its end, rarely use a deck that is less than six feet deep, and avoid courtyards that are almost completely enclosed. He articulated the way porches build communities but also give people an opportunity to shed their public selves before entering a private space. He pointed out that a big room with a high ceiling can make people uncomfortable, but if you add alcoves, or lower a section of the ceiling to distinguish between areas for eating and socializing, people will relax accordingly. According to Alexander, an architect’s task is to carefully and deeply observe how we interact with our buildings and then to take that information and create houses that make us feel seen, encouraged, alive.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I THOUGHT ABOUT our house in Port Townsend, I dreamed of finding an architect who cared about that interactive relationship between home and human. But we had an extra layer to our project, which made it even trickier. Our house was already there, in all its motley glory. A collaborative renovation presents its own challenges, as it is a partnership not only with the clients but with the existing structure. To be successful, an architect needs to respect the original character of the building while at the same time working toward a vision that fits the people who will live within it. The job requires someone who can be part detective, part reader, able to determine subtle patterns in both house and humans, and then use them to integrate new with old. It’s a lot to juggle, and yet some people gravitate naturally toward this work, their imaginations freed by constraint rather than limitless possibilities.

  Unfortunately, it appeared that all the architects in Port Townsend were booked. I called and emailed, asked for suggestions from everyone I encountered—neighbors, the mail carrier, the guy at the hardware store. No luck. But then one day, while I was at the house waiting for a prospective general contractor, there was a knock on our front door. I opened it, expecting to see a burly builder but was surprised to find a small older man with bright eyes and a close-cropped beard. He looked like an elf, as dressed by Eddie Bauer.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Roman Greggory. Matt, across the street, told me you need an architect.”

  Maybe feng shui was right, I thought—maybe there was such a thing as a helpful-people door.

  Without further preamble, Roman took a quick step into the house, scanning the living room intently. He shook his head in confusion, walked into the dining room, gazed about, opened the door that led to the basement, and then walked back to me.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The front staircase. It should be…” He stared at the area that lay to the right of the front door as you entered. That part of the living room had always felt lopsided to me, unsure of its mooring. It had nothing to do with the foundation; it had just felt extra somehow.

  “There,” he said, pointing to the north wall. “There should be a staircase there.”

  The only stairway ascended up through the middle of the house, so narrow and twisting it had been impossible to remove the claw-foot bathtub we’d found discarded in one of the bedrooms. We hadn’t been able to figure out how they got it upstairs in the first place. Now, a puzzle piece clicked into place.

  “The back staircase was originally for servants,” Roman said.

  “Why would they take the front one out?” I asked—although perhaps it made its own kind of sense. With no front stairway, the living and dining rooms became obstacles you had to traverse to get to the private upper portions of the house, further separating the inhabitants from the outside world. And while
I doubted that had been the owners’ conscious motivation, it fit what I had seen of their lives thus far.

  Roman shrugged his shoulders, and we gazed for a while at that empty space. I imagined a wide, open staircase greeting you as you entered that front door. The graciousness, the welcome of it. The feeling that there was nothing to hide.

  “It would be beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s nice to take things back to what they were whenever you can.”

  We wandered through the house, stopping at the narrow kitchen/former butler’s pantry that ran along the west side of the house, adjacent to the dining and yuck rooms. I swung the door open, and we both stared at the space within. We had cleaned it out during the trash weekend, and the plates of desiccated meals, the god-awful stove, and the gnawed-open bags of flour and rice and oatmeal and cake mix had all gone the way of the trash, as had the rats. But that still left the room itself. Leaks in the roof had sent moisture running down the walls and into the floor for years. Every surface was coated with grease. The whole thing felt and smelled like a damp sponge left in the sink for months.

  “I don’t think you can save this,” Roman said. “We’re going to need to find another place for you to cook.” My heart sank, but part of me was relieved; I couldn’t stand the thought of preparing a meal in there.

  Where we would now put a new kitchen was another matter, however.

  “Don’t worry,” Roman said. “We’ve got options.”

  For the next half hour, we made our way through and around the house, Roman’s imagination spinning out ideas. Each one felt like the best combination of us and the house. I signed him up on the spot.

  * * *

  —

  AS ROMAN DROVE OFF, a truck arrived, and George, the contractor I’d been expecting, climbed out. As he walked up the front steps, I could see he had a sturdy build and an open face. I felt an instinctive confidence in him but no sparks between us. Good, I thought.